Worker Centers: Entering a New Stage of Growth and Development
By Janice Fine
Do worker centers represent the next stage of labor insurgency?

The Excluded Workers Congress: Reimagining the Right to Organize
By Harmony Goldberg and Randy Jackson
A report from the founding convention.

Today, the country's primary labor market - regular jobs with reliable wages, benefits, and terms of employment - is being drained by a rise in temporary and contract work with no security. By using its power as a contractor and by enforcing laws already on the books, government can turn millions of bad jobs into good ones.
Articles include:

• Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers - Annette Bernhardt, Ruth Milkman and Nik Theodore
Rebuilding our economy on the back of illegal working conditions is morally untenable -- and it is bad economics.

• Dark and Bitter - Nancy Cleeland
Food workers increasingly exist in a legal limbo with no protections for wages, benefits, job security, or life and limb. Why are employers like Hershey off the hook?

• Decent Work - Robert Kuttner
How government can get back on the side of promoting good jobs.

• Forgotten Corners of the Economy - Stephen Franklin
As unemployment rises, the illegal treatment of day laborers only worsens. Where's the government?

• Good Jobs, Healthy Cities - Peter Dreier
Some city governments are using their economic muscle to promote good jobs.

• Government Paves the Way - Paul Sonn and Annette Bernhardt
A decent work agenda for the Obama administration.

• Stuck on the Low Road - David Bensman
Deregulation turned truck driving from a good job into a bad one. Now, thanks to local organizing and government action, there's a better road.

• The Good War and the Workers - Steve Fraser
World War II defense contracts raised labor standards. Government could use the same leverage in peacetime.

• Which Side Is Government On? - David Moberg
Millions of contract workers whose salaries are ultimately paid by government live in poverty. Uncle Sam should demand high standards, not pay as little as possible.

From the summary:
Across the United States, growing numbers of employers are breaking, bending, or evading long-established laws and standards designed to protect workers, from the minimum wage to job safety rules to the right to organize. This "gloves-off economy," no longer confined to a marginal set of sweatshops and fly-by-night small businesses, is sending shock waves into every corner of the low-wage - and sometimes not so low-wage - labor market. What can be done to reverse this dangerous trend?

This report, based on the book The Gloves-Off Economy: Labor Standards at the Bottom of America's Labor Market (a Labor and Employment Relations Association volume published by Cornell University Press), provides a comprehensive yet compact summary of gloves-off practices, the workers who are affected by them, and strategies for enforcing workplace standards. The editors, four prominent labor scholars, have brought together economists, sociologists, labor attorneys, union strategists, and other experts to offer varying perspectives on both the problem and the creative, practical solutions currently being developed in a wide range of communities and industries. Bernhardt, Boushey, Dresser, and Tilly and the volume's 18 other authors combine rigorous analysis with a stirring call to renew worker protections.